King Abdullah II on Wednesday accused the Zionist entity of disrupting Jordan’s nuclear program which is aimed at meeting the dire energy needs and powering water desalination plants.

King Abdullah II on Wednesday accused the Zionist entity of disrupting Jordan's nuclear program which is aimed at meeting the dire energy needs and powering water desalination plants, in an exclusive interview with Agence France Presse.

"Strong opposition to Jordan's nuclear energy program is coming from Israel," the king said.

"When we started going down the road of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, we approached some highly responsible countries to work with us. And pretty soon we realized that Israel was putting pressure on those countries to disrupt any cooperation with us."

"A Jordanian delegation would approach a potential partner, and one week later an Israeli delegation would be there, asking our interlocutors not to support Jordan's nuclear energy bid," Abdullah stressed during the interview at his palace.

Jordan, which imports 95 percent of its energy needs, is struggling to find alternatives to unstable Egyptian gas supplies, which normally cover 80 percent of the kingdom's power production.

It is worthy to recall that Jordan had signed a peace treaty with the Zionist entity of occupation in 1994.

With desert covering 92 percent of its territory, the kingdom is one of the world's 10 driest countries and wants to use atomic energy to fire desalination plants to overcome its crippling water shortage.

"Nuclear energy will be the cheapest reliable way to desalinate water," the king said.

"The attacks on the Egyptian gas pipeline over the past two years have cost us already JOD2.8 billion.  That could have paid for almost one reactor," he added.

On the other hand, a Zionist official on Wednesday dismissed the charges by Jordan's King Abdullah II, calling the accusation "a hollow excuse."

"Every time that we were consulted on this we adopted a positive approach," the official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Jordan is currently weighing an offer by a consortium formed by French nuclear giant Areva and Japan's Mitsubishi as well as a proposal by Russia's Atomstroyexport to build the country's first nuclear plant.

A joint venture between Jordan Energy Resources Incorporated and Areva discovered in June more than 20,000 tons of uranium in central Jordan.